He shut the door quietly behind him, leaving her panting, half-naked on his desk, wondering if she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life.
Chapter Ten
Adrian managed to holdit together until he reached his attic laboratory. He even managed to shut the door behind him with a quiet click, calmly sliding the lock, before his rage and heartache exploded.
With a roar of fury, he swept his worktable with his arm, sending glass vials and books flying.
The sound of breaking glass was somehow soothing, so he swept another table as well, ruining the delicate experiments he’d been concentrating on for months.
What did it matter? What did any of it matter, when the woman he’d trusted so much had just betrayed him in such a soul-deep way?
Gold-digging bitch!
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen this in her, this willingness to sell her soul, her body, everything he’d thought so precious, just for money and security. And what made him even angrier was the fact that he hadn’t told her to go fuck herself. Even through the haze of his anger, he’d realized in some rational part of his mind that this was the only way he could have her. And pathetic wretch that he was, it had been a price he was willing to pay.
He had found out the truth about her, but he’d also ensured that he could lose himself in her beautiful body whenever he wanted. The horrific farce she’d suggested was probably the only way he’d ever have a wife and family of his own.
He hated himself for wanting those things, for wanting just a taste of the happiness Morgan had seemed to find so easily.
Fairly snarling with self-disgust, he went to the cabinet and opened a bottle of scotch, downing a quarter of it in one long gulp, straight from the mouth of the bottle. As the familiar burn spread through him, he poured himself a glass.
* * * *
ADRIAN STIRRED AT THEthunderous pounding on the attic door. Blinking blearily, he struggled to sit up, realizing he’d passed out in the chair, then somehow slid to the floor. He ached in every muscle in his body, and a terrible headache pounded behind his eyeballs, threatening to make him empty his stomach of the poison he’d been pouring into it for two—or was it three?—days straight.
“Adrian, open up! I know you’re in there.”
Christ, it’s Lucien.
“Adrian. Come on. Clinton told us you haven’t come out in days. We’re worried about you.”
Good God. Morgan, too.
His brothers rarely ganged up on him this way.
“Go away,” he muttered, but his voice came out a ragged, shredded rasp. They couldn’t possibly hear him. He reached for the bottle near his hip, only to realize it was empty. When had he finished it off? The last thing he remembered was opening it.
